Although mostly a technical crowd we started off my asking who in the crowd was a developer, a UI person or a business person and the room was evenly distributed. After introductions and a quick look at the original Data Portability Project video we took the audience through an overview of how we got to what we called 'a personal web' and then some tech inflection points as to how the 'stack' has been building up and what the digital user experience is today (see slides below).

Chris then jumped into an important discussion in framing the data portability conversation around what he has called the "The mythical value of data lockin". Like he says in his post on the subject, as project members we constantly get asked:

Why would a vendor allow users to leave their service?

Why make it easy for users to take the preacious data you have about them and use it on other sites?

or…

What is the business justification for letting data walk out the door?

One of the key messages we wanted to portray to the Web 2.0 Expo crowd as they were thinking about business issues that Chris outlines in his post on his personal blog was that Data Portability is "about enabling, empowering and encouraging your users to bring all their data with them, to connect your data to the rest of their data ecosystem and to continue to refresh and maintain the data on an ongoing basis". The benefits should be twofold and bi-directional.

Before the Q&A session, we took the audience through the actual project objects and some of the project results we expect to deliver and how to get involved regardless of how much 'free' time you have!

Some session attendees also took some detailed notes (thanks!), including: